


Werewolf Holiday

by lottiearmitage



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:34:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24153634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lottiearmitage/pseuds/lottiearmitage
Summary: Polly has known for a long time that she is a werewolf. She's chosen to ignore it. After all, no good could come out of abandoning what made her human - her job; her house; her safety. When an old friend contacts her out of the blue, she finds herself questioning her decisions. It is up to her to make the choice: settle for the security of her old life, or transform for good.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

I wake up with the lights on.

The lights are on. The lights are always on. I know that they are on. I know many things, but the only thing to know when I wake up is that the lights are on. To let it in - to let in everything else that I know, and to let all of the different things that I know congeal into a bright ball of warm knowledge inside my head - would be something. I am not sure what sort of a something. Something like inviting a small flame into my house and offering it hot coals for breakfast.

I wake up with the lights on. That is all I know for now.

I am quite awake now, which I can tell from the warmth of my hands on my knees, and then, as I lift them up, around my own wrists, sitting with one hand holding the other, feeling the skin. It looks smooth and feels pale. Mostly it feels very unlike my own skin, not that I would understand, were I to feel it, what that is supposed to feel like. There is no other way to explain it. If I were to try, I would say it feels apologetic somehow, aware that it is not supposed to be on my body and equally aware that it has nowhere else to go, because it has landed itself with the reluctant job of fencing my insides out of the outside. It has been this way since birth.

It was not long after birth that I became aware of my first important piece of knowledge, and that was the knowledge of the other skin. I try not to talk or think much about the other skin.

It does cross my mind, of course, as it does every morning when I wake up and see that the lights are still on. The reason I keep them on is always there. I keep them on because the one thing I don’t know - after all this knowledge - is what I would do in the dark. I am capable of more in the dark. I know what I am capable of, but I do not know how far my moral compass could swing to accommodate it.

I eat breakfast in the same room I woke up in, more or less; just a few steps across the carpet and a turn to the left where the sun drips through the blinds. It looks ill today. A malnourished sun. Its face is pale and bright, burning as if with an irrepressible fever. May, and it has not yet prepared for summer.

As for summer and all it implies -

_running with the lights off, far enough away from any source of light for it to even make a difference, being caught in a different light entirely, one that catches in eyes and limbs and teeth and turns to electricity, becoming the running, until all that is left is running, and nothing is left of you, though at the same time your heart beats and your lungs press against your chest and you are the most like you that you have ever been, on the edge of nothingness, wanting to run until you reach the edge of the world and then to let go of the earth, to jump -_

\- it can wait. It can take its time. There will be no summer for as long as I keep myself safe indoors.

The radio is on. The radio is always on, because if it wasn't on there would only be traffic noise, and traffic noise makes my neck hurt. The announcements happen between each song and the next. _And now it is time for something by someone featuring someone, in at number something_... More creeping piano trills and slithering bass. There is always something on, unless it is late at night, or if it is for whatever reason interrupted. The interrupts hurt. The interrupts happen when something has happened outside. The news bulletins happen. Then the music comes back, soft and slow, because stabbings and shootings and crashes can always be cured by gentle music. It is the calm after the storm, like an anaesthetic given to a patient when the pain of the operation is already over. It makes no sense.

On this day, my music is interrupted by a phone call. This in itself is unusual. Not _too_ unusual, because there are people who give me a call every once in a while. Last time it was because of an accident. There is rarely any good news on the end of the phone. As I pick it up, I wonder who has had an accident this time, and whether I should be sad.

It's not an accident.

'Hello?'

I've read somewhere that it is unwise to say your name, much less the word 'yes', on the phone to someone you don't know. I only say 'hello' for this reason. It is unsure; it hangs in the air.

'Hello.'

The reply is not unsure. It is not a question.

'Oh, hello,' I say again, not sure of what else to say, or whether there is anything else to say, or whether his tone is lying and there has been an accident after all.

'Hello,' he says, and now I know that there is no accident. 'Am I speaking to Polly Montgomery?'

'You are.'

Silence on the line. Lung-crackling static.

'So you are Polly Montgomery?'

'Yes. I said so.'

'Ah. Good.'

I pause. 'And what is your name?'

'Oh. Sorry.' He breathes out between words, like the breath is snagging itself on his pauses. 'Damien.'

'Ah.'

This. This is part of the knowledge - knowing Damien. I did know Damien, once. I don't know if I still do. The Damien I knew then was part of a certain other knowledge, _that_ knowledge, and I don't know if I want to dig that knowledge out of its neat little grave but I know for certain that small bones are already beginning to poke out of the earth, and now the phone is wet with sweat and my voice cracks to a creased hiss. I do not need this phone. I want to take a pair of pliers and cut it off at the root.

'How are you?' I say.

'Fine, thank you. You?'

'Fine.' 

More static. Apologetic static.

'I was thinking about you yesterday,' he said.

'Oh, you _were_ , were you?'

I didn't mean for it to sound like that, not particularly, but it did sound like that and I am not altogether upset that it did.

'Yes. I was.'

'What were you thinking about?' I say. The phrase is limp and flat and I don't want to know, I _don't_ want to know, but I can't put the phone down. The bloody phone won't leave my bloody hands. The blood is on my hands, then. My fault. For something. I don't know what. I don't want to know -

'Thinking about how it was,' he says.

'How it was.'

'Yes.'

I inhale sharply. 'You don't remember how it bloody was.'

'Polly?'

'Goodbye.'

It only takes one press of one button to get rid of Damien and his rustling, breathful voice and his polite confusion and his itching niceties. Now I am Polly again. Polly in her room with the lights on; Polly in her clothes that are tastefully too big, painting portraits and filing paperwork.

The phone rings again.

'Hello?'

'Come and meet me. Two o'clock at Mabel's Coffee. We can catch up.'

'Sure.'

I put it down again. I close my eyes. I try to collapse, but find that I do not have the motivation to fall in the correct way, in a way that wouldn't seem calculated; I can't let myself fall from the emotion of it. Perhaps I had wanted him to call. Perhaps I am accepting it - or perhaps he is a changed man. Changed creature. Perhaps if he wants to meet in public he is ready to claw his way back into the real world. Perhaps he is not an animal any more.

The knowledge is in my head. It is growing legs.


	2. Chapter 2

Mabel’s Coffee is a family-run business advertising homemade cakes - that is to say it is run by three different people, all of whom belong to families, and that its cakes are made in a building which was perhaps a home once. It is small, squeezed between a charity shop and an overpriced pharmacy. It is important.

It is important because it does not feel like somewhere Damien would go.

I do not think of the types of places Damien would go, or at least try not to, as I walk nearer. He is drawn -  _ was  _ drawn - to dark places; remote places; places where death is still a real thing which can and does happen in a crude, unrelenting way; places with no hospitals; places with no safe walls to seal you in. The act of not thinking is proving itself futile.  _ He has changed,  _ I tell myself.  _ Why else? He has changed, and he’s now a frequent customer of pinkly-decorated coffee shops. He has changed, he has changed, he has ch- _

He is the same.

The bell tinkles; the door closes behind me. He’s there on the closest chair, practically in the doorway. It is almost an anticlimax. I expected more walking, more time for regret, more time for my thoughts to crescendo. He’s sitting with his shoulders slouched, smiling at me a little apologetically. It’s an open pose. I am reminded at once that I have known him for years - 

\-  _ and that’s the problem, the knowing, the knowledge of what he did, of what he used to do and what I strain to hope in my mind of minds that he does not do now, and the knowledge is coming in thick bursts now, tripping over itself in visions of heavy summer evenings and smoke and running feet, and he knows what he did and he knows what I did and he’s pretending not to remember at all - _

\- He’s  _ pretending. _

‘Nice to see you,’ I say. It isn’t. My head feels clean and hollow like a recently emptied hospital room. The knowledge is somewhere else. In my chest, perhaps. Animals are kicking at my ribs.

‘Nice to see you too.’

He’s dressed nicely, it occurs to me. I am too, I suppose, but only as far as I could manage to do so, and in my own peculiar way - grey skirt; black shoes; roomy white jumper. He has the look about him of someone wearing extremely expensive clothes who is careful to disguise the fact that he is wearing extremely expensive clothes. They fit him perfectly. He is tall, now, but still has the thinness about him that I always remember. Thin hands; thin neck. He’s done something to his hair involving gel. He’s still exactly the same. He’s still Damian.

‘I’m going to be very blunt with you,’ he says as I’m sitting down, not bothering to look me in the eyes. ‘You are going to die.’

He’s still Damien.

I’m smaller in my simple clothes all of a sudden. My blood is quick and full and slipping through my veins like dry rice into a bowl. I imagine it making the same sound; a rasping, stuttering, spattering pulse. For a second I am empty of all thought and I am instead  _ there _ , stuck in the slowness of Mabel’s Coffee on a Wednesday afternoon, still in the steady ooze of waiters and queuing customers, none of whom have heard what Damien had to say.

I process it. I feel myself blink once, twice.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ he reiterates, smiling at me with the same apologetic smile he’d used to greet me. ‘You are going to die.’

‘And how do you know that?’

‘We all are.’

Stupid bloody Damien with his stupid abstract way of speaking and his stupid sense of humour that never quite dresses itself up as humour. I nod.

‘Are you scared?’ he says. He sounds hopeful.

‘What?’

‘Of what I just told you. Of dying.’

‘No.’ I steady myself on the chair. ‘Maybe.’

‘I’m scared,’ he says.

Through the radio-static fuzz of my pulse I look at him more closely. There’s a tone to his voice that I can’t understand, or can’t bring myself to understand; one of the two. It occurs to me at that moment that there is absolutely nothing mysterious about him. His motives are stretched out clear and thin across his face. Wide brown eyes. Small white teeth. Slender brows that droop down at the sides like a spaniel’s. Perhaps he is the undiluted core of what a human is; perhaps I don’t understand him because my time spent around others has dulled my thoughts to the point of seeking mysteries in everything, because to take something at face value would be weak.

Then again, I know I am wrong because he is not at all human. Not really.

‘Are you?’

‘Very,’ he says, still smiling. ‘And you’re not.’

‘I’m scared of you.’

‘Don’t be.’ He leans forward, almost spilling his coffee. ‘I’m going to help you.’

‘With what?’

‘Boredom.’

‘I’m not bored,’ I say, not knowing for sure whether I am or not. I have my apartment. I have my job. I’m busy, not bored. It’s safer that way.

‘You are. I am too.’

It would be different if he was sarcastic or mocking or subtle or  _ something _ . All at once I can feel the cushions pressing into me and the floor trapping my feet and the scrape of the table against my knees and I’ve had enough. I stand up, and now I’m taller than him, and he looks even thinner than before, and from this angle his eyes are rounder and the slope of his nose is almost innocent.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks.

‘Home.’

‘You haven’t even ordered anything yet.’

‘I didn’t come here for the coffee.’ I turn around, catching my toe on the chair leg and wishing the room was crowded enough for me to shout a little louder. ‘I came here to meet you, and now I have met you, so I’m going home.’

‘Come to my house,’ he says.

I freeze; my clothes swing towards the door without me. He’s not angry or pleading. He’s gently encouraging. His hands are flushed red by the heat of his coffee mug and he has the faintest matching blush on the tip of his nose and he looks distinctly unthreatening; he looks like a bird of some sort; like a sparrow.

‘Why?’

‘It’s just been redecorated. You haven’t been to my house before, have you?’

_ Of course I haven’t. You bloody know I haven’t.  _ ‘No.’

‘We need to catch up. I need to tell you about things. Lots of things have happened to me in the past few years; I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. It won’t be boring. What about you? Things must have happened to you, too.’

He talks. All he does is talk. Just as well, perhaps, because when he’s not talking, he’s thinking. When he’s not thinking, he’s doing. When he’s doing -

‘It’s a ten minute walk. We live so close together. We really should be better friends.’

There is absolutely no escape.


End file.
